Author: sachaarcher

Edward Kulemin’s Cash Register Poems are presented in a simple 3×5.5″ single stapled bundle. 9 pages, full colour, printed on one side–replicating the common sight of end of the night receipts collected and stapled at our favourite stores.

This collection of asemic writing brings us into the heart of our purchasing centered lives where our movements leave a paper trail. Kulemin, having picked up this paper we accumulate, has reengaged these non-creative sites of record with invigorating graffiti–in this case the language of exasperation, and hope.

Amanda Earl’s The Book of Ruth is an 8.5×8.5″ chapbook of 6 sheets of cardstock, printed on one side. With a simple cover and back of reflective gold coloured cardstock, the chapbook is bound with loose binder rings.

Amanda Earl’s series, The Vispo Bible, which has been appearing in serial through various small presses, is an ongoing project in which Earl, confronting the Holy Bible, reshapes the Old and New Testaments. Book by book, chapter by chapter, Earl presents a re-imaged feminist vision of these patriarchal texts by digitally sculpting each chapter into strikingly sensual visual poems. Here is the Book of Ruth.

May Bery’s work Confinement/Trespass has been published in an edition of 30 broadsides (18×24″). Following the signs, the work has been folded similarly to a road map.

Using a map of Richmond, Quebec as a starting point and canvas/page, May Bery has intervened in and interrupted the placid function of the map with her asemic paragraphs and bold borders. The paragraphs create isolated language zones which in turn echo Arabic, mathematical signs (the universal language), and noise. Confinement/Trespass does more than suggest the tie of language to identity and identity to belonging–it asserts the presence of peoples, the feeling of trespass and the fact of diversity.

waterlight by andrew brenza is a 17×6.5″ chapbook of 10 pages printed in an edition of 45 copies.

Coupling a more traditional lyric poem with lavish spreads of concrete poetry, andrew brenza has written a sequence, a poem, that delivers you back to the natural world, the surface of a body of water, where we can gaze down and lose ourselves in the light of language, or be engulfed by its noise. Landing somewhere between the serenity of isolated nature and the white noise of a TV screen, this is a reading experience of body in place.

derek beaulieu’s Fragmentum is a 5×7″chapbook of 6 pages printed in an edition of 55 copies. A sturdy little chapbook printed entirely on cardstock and bound with a round head fastener for a slightly different navigational process.

In Fragmentum, beaulieu continues to probe the possibilities of his favorite medium, letraset. Moving away from his signature compositions consisting of recognizable letters which spread across the page like topographical landscapes, the pieces in Fragmentum embrace the broken, fragmented inevitability of the aging medium to present abstract forms where letter fragments combine to build a sculptural asemic language.

The title translating translating apollinaire should be a little bit too familiar. Of course, bpNichol published his translation experiments, focusing on a single poem of Guillaume Apollinaire, with just this title in 1979. In fact, bpNichol’s first published poem was titled Translating Apollinaire.
Gary Barwin is one of those people lucky enough to have had the opportunity to study under Nichol. It is no surprise then that Barwin has, without masking it in any way, continued Nichol’s project of translating Apollinaire, a project which Nichol himself said was “an open-ended, probably unpublishable in its entirety, piece“. This seems about right. It is as if the concept in and of itself is a seed to an infinite number of books. Here is one of them–a great one.

Volodymyr Bilyk’s Lisa Simpson Poems is a 40 page chapbook in which each page has been recovered from various discarded books. Produced in an edition of 50.

Originally intended to be paired with photographs for a project that fell through, the poems in this chapbook were delivered to the editor superimposed onto images of Lisa Simpson–hence the title. Moving to text as ambient image, Bilyk’s poems have been placed on pages from discarded books. The poems themselves are difficult to describe. The writing process which Bilyk employs–an ongoing metamorphosis of certain, now unrecognizable, texts–gives us poems which thrash language with itself. Remaining composed, the poems bleed images.

Tonopah and TidewaterRR (for Harry Partch)is an 8.5″x11″ trifolded pamphlet with colophon by J. Mulcahy-King. It has been produced in an edition of 65 copies.

Utilizing the Chinese tonal system, J. Mulcahy-King has composed a piece with only the letter O. Mapping the articulations on a grid to correspond with instruments invented by Harry Partch, Tonopah and TidewaterRR is a sustained shifting utterance in which each shift indicates the movements of trains along the referred to line.

Latenza is a 8.5×14″ broadside by Francesco Aprile. It has been produced in an edition of 50.

In Latenza, Francesco Aprile’s glitch work harnesses the moment between desire’s push and the point of arrival, redefining that very point of arrival where the fulfillment of action has already gone too far. Considered in the field of visual poetics might this be an echo of the space between word and meaning, thought and writing? Suspended in the between where mood dominates, there is a sense of moving toward an ambient poetics.

ADDDA is a 12×17″ print by Sacha Archer. The last of three works printed in Tianjin, China, ADDDA has been produced in an edition of 25 copies.

Chosen from an ongoing series of collages by Sacha Archer, ADDDA continues Archer’s exploration of compositional techniques as applied to concrete poetry. In his collage work, the animal (and representational) is always trying to push through–sometimes more, sometimes less evidently. In these works, and ADDDA is no exception, there is a persistent tension between the letter, form and gesture.

Sacha Archer, ADDDA, [Domestic/Canada] FOLDED

Price includes shipping

C$7.50

Sacha Archer, ADDDA, [Domestic/Canada] UNFOLDED

Price includes shipping

C$20.00

For international orders please email simulacrumpress at gmail dot com and we can determine the shipping cost.